A silver halide camera and a digital camera are well known image capturing apparatuses. Many of these image capturing apparatuses are provided with a flash device and capable of capturing images with maintaining sufficient brightness by illuminating a subject even in low light conditions. In addition, a cell-phone with camera is widely used. Cell-phones with camera having a flash device are also available in the market in recent years.
A xenon tube has been used as a flash source of a conventional flash device. However, a flash device using a light emitting diode (hereinafter, LED) is proposed recently, since the LED produces less noise, is easy to be miniaturized and is manufactured at low cost.
For example, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US2002/0025157 (corresponding to Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-116481) discloses a digital camera that uses R, G and B LEDs as a light source of a flash device. This flash device controls a proportion of light emission amounts of the R, G and B LEDs according to a color temperature of the subject. Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-148686 discloses a camera that uses a plurality of white LEDs having relatively narrow illumination angle. In this camera, criterial brightness information and brightness values obtained from each metering area by multi-metering are compared. Based on a result of the comparison, the LEDs are controlled to selectively emit light. For this configuration, the camera is capable of photographing with well-balanced brightness throughout a shooting area.
However, various problems occur in flash photography. For example, a person as a main subject may close his or her eyes when photographed with a flash light in a dim room, since the flash light is too bright. When there is a bright object in the middle of the shooting area, the flash light is emitted for short time if an auto-flash function is activated. As a result, the face of a main subject may be underexposed. Moreover, flash photography under the illumination of tungsten light hardly provides a vivid illustration of the shooting scene.
An object of the present invention is to provide an image capturing apparatus capable of emitting a flash light that is not too bright for a person as a main subject, and assures good color balance and uniform brightness throughout a whole frame.